Zack slumped back in his seat and regarded the phone in his hand. He’d known all along he was going to have to call Langley at some point. At first, they’d been running for their lives… but later? Who knows why he put it off. It had seemed beside the point somehow. Like, how could a building full of people in northern Virginia help them? But now he knew he had a clear obligation, at the very least, to report that the safehouse, the principal CIA facility in Somaliland, was gone. Had been taken off the game board entirely.
He checked the glowing phone face in the dark of the truck cabin. He’d have to charge it soon. Luckily, they had a “universal” charger in the truck, that worked with all of their phones, and most of their other devices. But the battery still showed around 50% and he couldn’t be bothered right now. Moreover, the sat signal was still tolerable, so he dialed Langley. After a few minutes delay, he got put through to the senior duty officer, who was also his immediate supervisor. And in quiet and professional tones, he reported everything he knew. Everything that had happened to them so far.
“Okay,” his boss said in response. “Heading for Lemonnier was probably the right call. It’s probably your best option. So we’re not second-guessing that.” Zack felt distinctly unreassured by the agreement that this was their best option – i.e. that the Agency had nothing better to offer them. “I’m going to try and marshal some assets to rendezvous with you, either on the road, or when you get to the base – though at that point you should be fine, security-wise… But I’m having serious fucking trouble getting anything done anywhere across the region. So don’t hold your breath, and for now proceed as if you’re on your own. This is exactly what we give you the Tier-1 shooters for. Plus, at the moment, we’re starting to have big problems elsewhere across this fucking globe…”
“You want to tell me what else is going on in the world?” Zack said.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on there? What your analysis is, on top the empirical data points?”
Zack sighed quietly in the dark womb of the rumbling SUV. “What’s going on? My analysis? My analysis is it’s the beginning of the end of the world.” He heard a countering sigh on the other end.
“Okay, Zack. Keep moving, get to Lemonnier, and hang tight there. I’ll get back to you as soon as we’ve got something for you.”
And the line went dead.
Zack considered briefing the others on the call. But he figured they got the gist from his end of it. And the report was really “nothing to report.” Langley had nothing for them.
He continued to monitor the backs of the two SEALs from behind, heads misshapen with the all-seeing prostheses on their faces. SOF guys, Zack knew, were by definition the most resilient and resolute people in the world. That’s the only way they got to be SEALs, or other elite operators, in the first place – the selection courses weeded out anybody who had even the faintest trace of quit in them. And from then on, they had “get-it-done” attitudes that just never, ever died. He tried to imagine what these two were thinking right now.
And Zack knew another, related, fact. That the guys who ultimately survive – whether it’s a firefight, or a natural disaster, or a medical emergency in the wilderness, TEOTWAKI, whatever… the guys who survive are the ones who are absolutely determined to. Who are willing to do whatever it takes to get themselves out alive. To make sure it’s the other guy who doesn’t go home. Who aren’t going to be the victims today.
Those ones are the survivors.
Zack knew this intellectually. But he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t make himself believe that this was going to work out okay. In fact, all of his hard-earned erudition and acuity and savvy in the game… all of it seemed like so much worthless trivia. For a board game. For use in some other world, one that had burned completely away, and left them flailing at empty air in some dying abyss.
He’d taken more drugs a half hour ago. But in addition to the pounding head and arm, he began to feel like he was running a fever. He wiped away a thin gloss of sweat on his forehead. After rolling around with that sick paratrooper… could he…? It was certainly possible. But, no, it couldn’t be. He knew he needed to warn the others that he was at risk. But he couldn’t make his voice work. He was too afraid. He turned on the overhead light and checked his reflection on the inside of the window glass. He looked okay. Bob said, “Turn that off, buddy. Screws with the NVGs.” Zack flicked the light back off.
As the window went transparent again, he looked out at the black landscape blurring by at high speed all around them. He thought he saw another one of them. Staggering by. He couldn’t tell anymore, it was probably his imagination at this point… His chin began to nod on his chest as the adrenaline bled out, and the accumulated stress and fatigue and exhaustion crept in.
He wasn’t really asleep when a voice jolted him awake. He looked up and out the front. They were just barely rolling forward now, a couple of miles an hour. And in the glare of the truck’s headlights – they’d been driving without them until now – he could see a riot of abandoned vehicles directly ahead. They filled not only the road, but the tiny bit of shoulder there was to either side. Beyond the shoulders, the ground fell away, disappearing out of sight.
This was the beginning of a bridge.
And, as it was totally blocked, it looked like it might also be the end of the road.
Something stirred in the shadows where the headlights didn’t go.
One Damned Thing
“We’re gonna have to move them,” Dugan said.
Shitty Eastern bloc subcompacts, a couple of clapped-out pick-up trucks, a larger freight truck, a Daihatsu mini-SUV, and a passenger bus all sat in dense disarray before them. They blocked all of the road, most of the shoulder – and jammed the entrance to the shoulderless bridge entirely.
“Check,” Maximum Bob said. He twisted around to the back again. “How you guys doin‘?”
“Good to go,” Baxter said. “Let’s get it done.” He sounded steadier to Zack now. Like he had gotten his head around their situation, and remembered that his job was to do his job – to do it to the best of his ability, and to not let anybody down. As Zack had always sensed, he was a good one. And he was proving it now. He’d also been picking up jargon from the SEALs.
“Okay, basically,” Bob said, “we’re going to have to secure the area before we can start clearing the road. And that means… clearing out any sick people.”
“Clear out?” Zack asked.
Dugan sighed. “Look, Zack. They’re attacking and infecting everybody in sight. One of them had you by the legs back there. And you didn’t see it, and I didn’t tell you about it at the time, but I got a close-up look at a gang of them taking down one of the militia members, outside the safehouse. They tore into him with teeth and claws. Tore out chunks of his flesh with their fucking teeth. I watched the guy choke on his own blood, after they tore his throat out. They’re fucking dangerous.”
“What, all of them? How sick do they have to be before they start tearing out throats?”
Dugan exhaled. “We have no way of knowing. Our situation is extremely precarious. And, at this point, it’s us or them. And it ain’t gonna be us. You copy that?”
Zack now sighed himself. It’s not going to be us, he thought. “Yeah. Okay. I get it.”
“Stay in the truck for now,” Bob said. “But keep your weapons ready. We’re going to flow through the area and clear it. Keep your eyes open.”
“Roger that,” Zack and Baxter said in tandem. They both took a couple of steadying breaths.
Dugan killed the headlights, and he and Bob exited in their NVGs, rifles held to shoulders. They began firing before they were even halfway to the knot of vehicles. Zack couldn’t see what they were shooting at. He tried to look around to the sides and rear, but it was very dark again. He couldn’t hear anything except the occasional staccato crack of the M4s. Four minutes later, it was done.
Bob pulled open Zack’s door and motioned for him to hop out. “
There were only a handful,” he said. “And a lot of bodies mixed in. However…” he pulled his NVGs off and seated them on Zack’s head, then pointed them toward the bridge. “See that slope?”
Zack did. On the other side of the bridge, the road sloped upward for a good 300 meters, before disappearing over the crest. Zack guessed it was a ridge of hills ringing the coastal plain beyond, a common geographical feature in East Africa. What wasn’t common, at least until now, was plague victims stumbling down the hillside. Zack could make out four or five. Then one more came over the saddle. They were all still some distance away.
“Pretty sure they appeared only after we started shooting. And I paid attention after that, saw them perking up, and speeding up, when I fired again. Which means—”
“Which means,” Dugan said, rounding the vehicle, “sound draws them. Which means we need to avoid firing if at all possible.”
“Great,” Baxter said, slinging himself out of the vehicle now, carrying his own M4. “No shooting?”
“If we can avoid it,” Bob said. “Don’t worry, the area’s clear right now, and that bunch will be twenty minutes getting down and across the bridge. Which will be enough time for us to clear the road.”
Zack said, “Wait a second. Those cars there at the back. At least a couple of them look like they crashed into the others.”
“So?” Dugan said.
“So our truck’s parked in the middle of the road. You should always get as far off the highway and onto the shoulder as possible. So you don’t get rear-ended.”
“There’s hardly any shoulder,” Dugan said, peering down one of the slopes that dropped off from around the foot of the bridge. “Plus we’re going to need the headlights on the scene to work. Anyway, I think whatever exodus was heading down this road is over. And we’ll be gone in a few minutes. It’ll be fine.” He clapped Zack on the shoulder.
Zack started to remove the NVGs. “Oh, no,” Bob said, pushing them back down firmly. “You and Dugan are going to pull security, while Baxter and I drive these things out of the way.” He motioned to Baxter. “Can you hit the headlights for me?” As Baxter leaned in to do so, Bob said to Zack, “Make sure and look somewhere else – behind us would be an excellent choice.” Zack complied. The truck’s headlights, then its brights, clicked on and turned the tangle of vehicles once again into a surreal stage lit by bright footlights. Even from where they stood, splashes of blood could be made out on some of the windows. The limbs of at least one body lay visible on the ground, half behind a car.
As Baxter and Bob got moving, Zack touched Bob’s arm. “Two quick things. One, you can’t be coming in contact with blood, viscera, or any other contaminants in those vehicles. Okay? Take a couple of bottles of water to splash them down. Hell, take some disinfectant.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “Good thinking. What’s the other thing?”
“Berbera’s just over that hill. And it’s a pretty major population center, by local standards.”
Bob nodded, his big square head bright in Zack’s green-and-white night vision view. “Maybe it’s not anymore.”
“Just keep quiet and try to move fast.”
* * *
Zack took up his position at the rear of the Tahoe. And he got busy looking off into the light-enhanced night, panning left and right, then peering straight up the road again. There was nothing to see. But being able to see inside the darkness like this still felt like transcending the rules of the Matrix. That he could see anything moving out there, but it wouldn’t see him. It gave him a giddy feeling of invulnerability. He’d worn NVGs before. But never in a situation where he might have to use them to shoot somebody.
He heard the first vehicle engine start up behind him. He spared a look over his shoulder – but it was too bright with the headlights going. It hurt his brain, which hurt a lot anyway. But it didn’t matter. He was responsible for their six, and needed to focus on that. He adjusted his grip on his pistol, and tried to tune in to the night, as well as peer underneath it with the goggles.
The other thing he hadn’t been able to see anymore, through the cone of headlight glare, was the slope on the opposite side of the bridge – or the bridge itself for that matter. He couldn’t see the figures that were moving down and toward them, couldn’t see how close they’d gotten, nor how many there were. It made his skin crawl to know that they were out there, trudging their way forward, on an inevitable intercept with his people, vulnerable and oblivious in their warm little cone of light. A cone they couldn’t see out of…
Zack heard the same engine rev up, presumably as the vehicle started rolling. And then a second engine, in a different timbre, started beneath it. Shortly after, there was a metallic crunch. Zack spared another glance behind him, on the periphery of the cone of light. Bob had driven a clapped-out pick-up truck right off the road and down the slope, where it had stopped against a couple of trees. Zack heard the engine stop, then saw Bob hop out, climb up the slope, and start assisting Baxter in a similar maneuver. This time, they kept the driver’s-side door open and Baxter hopped out as the vehicle passed the apex of the slope and sped up. It stopped when it crunched into the first truck. Then its engine stalled out. Must have been a manual transmission, still in gear. When it stopped, it died.
Sounds like our life lately…
But then Zack realized he was still hearing engine noise. Faint, but distinct. He spun to look behind them again, down the black-and-green road to the south. He also instinctively raised his pistol. He couldn’t see anything. But he could still hear it. A rumble and a whine, both growing louder together. And then it was there, hurtling down on them like doom. Zack didn’t know what else to do so he fired a couple of shots in panic. That didn’t do anything to stop it, though it did alert the others. Zack reflected that if its headlights had been on, he would have seen it a hell of a lot sooner. Now it was basically on top of him. He dropped into a half crouch, tensed his body to spring away, and at the same time shouted at the top of his voice:
“FUCKING RUUUUNNN!!!”
As he uncoiled his legs and hurled his body to his left and away, he caught one single strobe-light image, beautifully night-vision enhanced, directly into the cab of the cargo truck that was about to plow into them at full speed. It was of a Somali man, gripping the large wheel, eyes wide with maximal white showing, mouth forming a perfect O, his face frozen in a rictus of horror, obviously screaming, though there was no sound. There was a hand on his shoulder, an arm around his throat – and somebody’s head buried in the crook of his neck from behind, and shaking from side to side, like a dog with a chew toy.
And that was it.
It wasn’t a Hollywood explosion (everything in the movies is said to be “made of explodium”) but just a head-rending and earth-shaking crash as the big six-wheeled truck slammed into the back of the Tahoe like the railgun of God, pushing it forward, then over and aside, at which point it went tumbling ass over teakettle down the slope to the west – the opposite one Zack dove down – its headlight cone twisting and turning end over end and strobe-lighting the racing truck as it continued its crash into the knot of vehicles on the bridge. Great crunching and rolling and scraping sounds carried on for a full three seconds. Zack literally clung to the slope on the side of the road where his dive had taken him.
Aside from the irregular grind of a bent wheel still spinning, silence descended again on the scene – which was also black again with the Tahoe headlights gone. As Zack lay there, limbs spreadeagled, eyes wide in terror behind the NVGs, just trying to restart his heart and get control of his breathing… he heard, faintly at first, and then growing louder, a distinctly human sound.
Moaning.
Another
Everyone was alive. The four of them found each other as they all staggered back onto the road, basically at the spot where the Tahoe had been. For a few seconds, they milled around in a daze. Like people whose car had been towed – seeing it wasn’t there, but not believing, thinking it had to be
around there somewhere…
But the Tahoe was in fact gone. Their vehicle, their sanctuary – and all of their irreplaceable supplies… With the NVGs, Zack and Dugan could see the SUV, down at the bottom of the west-side slope, lying on its roof, at a steep angle, nearly 40 meters away. Even if they had any way of getting it back up to the road, never mind on its wheels, it was pretty obviously never going to run again.
“Great,” Zack muttered. “What the fuck do we do now?”
“Never mind that for a minute,” Bob said, feeling him up.
“I told you I’m fine.”
“I’ve heard guys with six bu—”
“Yeah, guys with six bullet holes in them say that. Okay, okay.” While Bob patted him down, pushing and prodding, Zack peered into the night over the top of Bob’s head, north this time, across the bridge. He stared motionlessly for a few seconds, his lips slightly parted.
“Uh, guys…” he finally said, his voice catching. “That crash was pretty loud…” Bob looked up at him, and the others looked over. Zack was peering into the distance, over the top of the bridge, at the hill sloping up on the other side. With the truck headlights now gone, he could make out the scene perfectly in the ambient starlight with the NVGs. And, once again, he saw and learned something he rather wished he hadn’t.
The road and top of the hillside were lousy with staggering figures, all descending and advancing directly toward them.
* * *
“Okay,” Dugan said, his rifle tucked in to his body. He was coiled, poised, ready to operate. “The truck’s gone. Tough shit. We adapt and overcome. You understand?”
Zack knew Dugan was talking to him and Baxter. They both nodded vigorously.
“Okay. It works like this. We’re going to get another vehicle, one from out of this group on the bridge. And we’re going to crossload the supplies from the Tahoe. We’re going to do it fucking fast. Then we’re going to get the fuck out of here. The clock’s ticking. But we all keep our heads, we work together – and we all make it. Okay?” The two analysts nodded again. Zack said a silent prayer of thanks that they had these two on their side. On his own, he knew he’d be dead, or perhaps slouching and moaning, back in Hargeisa right now.
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